Symfony is the worst thing that could've happened to PHP. Dependency injection with varying degrees of XML/YAML madness everywhere. It's terribly slow and pretty much unusable w/o several caching layers in front. I can honestly say that I hate this framework with a passion, and the language too. PHP's core and a big part of the community is copying features and methodologies from Java, but they will never get close to its performance, nor its functionalities. I left the ecosystem when PHP 5.1 was around... I left for good.